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Support Janna, the Killing Machine

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The enemy team’s best player was Janna. She made so many plays this game! This is pretty obvious considering the enemy Ezreal was negative, but our bot lane was negative as well.

This game was so close despite the enemy team not having their solo top player. Renekton must have felt like a total idiot after showing up to lane against Irelia with nothing but a Doran’s Blade. He got wrecked, then raged. I picked up a triple kill at the end of this game just before they could pass a surrender vote.

Akali has been a lot of fun recently, but I’m not sure I’m comfortable enough with her yet, but we’ll see.

The Throws

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This game was almost thrown away. We were so far ahead of this enemy team that I was beginning to think they may surrender at 20 minutes. With the help of Czarni I had managed to put Elise in a very dangerous situation top. I was way ahead in gold and kills and was almost ungankable by poor Xin. Mid had done well against Ryze, and bot lane had done very well in their laning phase. This game was in the bag.

The first throws happened when our team started to get caught out of position. We wanted Dragon control, but the enemy team forced mid instead of pressuring Dragon. We didn’t have the man power to fight Dragon, so our team tried to walk into mid. Urgot died. Pantheon walked in to avenge him. Dead. I tried to get by to the turret. Dead. Enemy team gets Dragon for free. Oh well, we still have a huge lead in this game.

Our next throw comes when we are bot lane. We manage to catch Ryze trying to defend his tower. We drop him quickly. Blitz tries to be a hero and we clean him up. Now we’re looking at a turret siege with a potential team fight in a 5v3 situation. This couldn’t be better for us. Now is the time to fight, when we have the man advantage and can pressure the enemy team away from their turret. Urgot commits to the fight, I hop into the fray, Vi starts to charge her dive, but Pantheon and Lux start to retreat. Our 5v3 just turned into a 3v3. Without any man advantage we’re only able to harm the enemy team, while they are able to clean us up. After we lost the 3v3 fight the enemy team just chased down our straggling team mates and killed them anyway. Vi made it out because she’s Vi and can jump over walls and solo anyone on the enemy team. Oh well, not the end of the world because we still have a good lead in this game.

The next throw we had was when we were pressuring mid lane. Ryze had oracles so they were clearing the wards inside of their base so we couldn’t see Blitz grabs coming. Despite Ryze’s ability to clear wards nubehound tried to drop one more over the wall. He was quickly grabbed by Ryze, and a full spell combo with a Graves Buckshot killed him. The enemy team came pouring out of mid lane. I stayed just below mid lane in the jungle and waited for them to push out. They were charging our base. I watched the minions to see that it was safe to sneak across mid lane. I ran to top where Elise was pushing. Using my friendly manatee, Urf, I was able to kill Elise. With her down and Lich Bane in my inventory I quickly destroyed top lane’s inhibitor turret and inhibitor before recalling. The enemy team didn’t even get our inhibitor turret. Oh well, we still have a decent lead in this game.

Our last throw came at Baron. With the enemy defending their base, behind in kills and gold, we pressured Baron. We have five people, we have a super tank in Vi, we have insane damage from Urgot, Pantheon, and myself. Baron will be dead in ten seconds. We’re chunking away at Baron when someone says “they’re coming, stop, get back.” I check the mini map, no sign of anyone on the enemy team. We walked all the way around to the bush behind red buff. Finally, the enemy team starts to trickle in. Baron would have been dead by now. We had it pinked so we knew they had no vision. Now Ryze can clear our ward and leave us blind. Czarni sees that we’re losing our vision so he steps up to ward Baron, but gets hooked by Blitz into the Baron pit. He can’t make it out. Our only tank just got swallowed by the entire enemy team. Oh well, we had a lead in this game.

I start to panic to see how we can salvage this game. I sprint around the Baron pit but keep my distance to avoid Blitz hooks and Elise webs. Ryze walks toward me to zone me out, so I troll poll away toward their blue. However, I don’t want their blue, I want their base.

Super minions are already pushing in, so drop down top lane with the minions. With Lich Bane I’m able to burn through the enemy team’s Nexus towers at an insane rate. When Graves comes to fight me I’m too fed for him to stand a chance. Elise comes flying out with homeguard boots and throws a web that misses me thanks to my troll poll. I’m forced to run out the bottom of their base, but luckily for me the team was chasing me so Urgot and Pantheon took mid tower. I circled around outside of the enemy base and helped to finish up killing Xin and Blitz. We have their base, and I hear the old announcer yell out the familiar “Ace!” The game is ours! We survived the throws!

Too many bad calls and throws almost cost us this game that we should have won easily. At least we walked away with the win!

Penta-Honored!

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I am going to show you the score screen from this game, but I don’t want you to get mad at me. I specifically gave this post this title to show you that the other team was having a good time too. I got five honor from this game, three of it coming from the other team.

We were having a LAN at my place to practice up for a future AHGL tournament and I needed to have fun. Having fun is an important part of a LAN. We had some good games, I’ll post about that double quadra-kill later, but for this game I had a short discussion with my fellow LAN players. I suggested that each of us play the strongest possible champion for our lane.

Team comp was Pantheon with Lux in bot lane. This was something that Jake and Jeff had done time and again. They always love it. I picked LeBlanc for mid. We had Teemo go top. We had Shen in the jungle. Kill lane bot. Ridiculous burst mid. Annoying shrooms top. Over-powered ultimate in the jungle. We knew we would have a good time. Let’s see what we’re up against. This is when my heart began to sink.

Pause for effect…

The other team looked nasty. Akali and Rumble. How can they have both?! Don’t both of those play top? I know Akali is going to kill me mercilessly late game, but I don’t know how I feel about Rumble. Bot lane for the enemy team is Taric and Vayne. Taric has a clean disengage with his stun. Vayne has a great distance creator with her E. Vayne is also running cleanse. The enemy team has a Riven jungle, who also scared me, as she is highly mobile, and normally too thick to burst down quickly. This Riven had won ten of her last ten games as reported by lolking. I was discouraged. Bot lane was discouraged. This game is starting to look better and better.

If bot lane could get their feet set I knew it would be a race to most kills. I managed to get First Blood from Rumble. I normally would recall after getting a kill that early, but I hadn’t burnt through my potions yet, so I stayed in lane. By the time Rumble was back I was level four and he was still level two. I took advantage of this level discrepancy and killed him again. However, despite my success in mid lane I didn’t have anyone on my back. By the time I got my third kill on Rumble bot lane was legendary. They had gone to work on Vayne and were just destroying her.

This bot lane quickly escalated into late game by keeping Vayne at a monstrous 0-15. I had managed to zone Rumble completely from creeps, keeping him from precious gold and even more precious experience. However, Akali, as expected, was able to take me from full health to completely dead in less than two seconds. My triple blink potential wasn’t enough to keep her off me. I had ventured top once or twice to help secure some kills in top lane, but Akali’s late game is very fun to witness.

It was around the middle of this game that we had a nasty revelation; Vayne wasn’t worth any money. We found that it wasn’t worth a summoner spell or an ultimate to kill her. She was only granting us about 15 gold per kill. We knew what needed to be done. We needed to sacrifice Lux to the feeder.

Vayne felt very comfortable around us by this point. Earlier in the game we had actually cornered her, murdered her support, dropped her to ~150 HP, and then walked around bot jungle with her. Lux, Pantheon, LeBlanc, and Vayne, a lovely looking posse. Lux was in a constant panic after I shouted out “don’t attack her!” to the guys in the room. Vayne eventually stopped walking and just started to recall, three enemies within a ranged auto attack’s distance. I tried to tell her to stop, then just gave Pantheon the go-ahead. He stepped forward and used the pointy end of his spear to cancel her recall. It also awarded him 15 gold.

Now we wanted to have a similar situation; Vayne caught by herself so she wouldn’t be able to escape or bring her team mates into battle, and have her attack Lux. Eventually the situation arose and Vayne took the bait. However, immediately after finishing off Lux she ulted, rolled, and then flashed to get distance from a then 10-2 LeBlanc. I had no intention to kill her, we simply needed Vayne to be worth money again. I congratulated Vayne on her heroic ability to run away so cleverly, and Riven interrupted to tell Vayne, in all-chat, that we let her have a kill so that she would be worth money again. I scolded Riven for having such a terrible idea. Of course we wouldn’t do such a thing! Vayne simply outplayed three very fed champions while she was 0-16! It could happen! Don’t crush her dreams!

The feast continued. We were chatting with the other team, they were chatting with us. We were apologizing that the game got so skewed so fast. They were very understanding. However, the wouldn’t surrender. We never asked them to, it just seemed strange to be down so many kills and not surrender. So we developed some more games.

I started to let Taric stun me. It started when I was attacking tower with a creep wave nearby. Taric came to defend. Knowing that I could kill him he bravely walked forward and used Dazzle on me. I stood still for a second or two as he retreated as quickly as fabulously possible. I continued to attack the turret and simply wrote “ow!” to which he responded, “I can’t do anything!” From that point on I would let Taric Dazzle me without any repercussions. I felt bad for the support in that game. I’m sure he did all he could for his AD, but Vayne going 2-25 was anything but his fault.

Rumble remained frustrated all game. I could understand his frustration, LeBlanc can be a strong pick for a blind pick game. Being melee versus LeBlanc is not something people enjoy. Congratulations to Akali for going positive in a game this one-sided. Thanks to everyone else on the team for staying positive and not raging.

First Ranked

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We made a new ranked team! This was a massive undertaking that took weeks of planning and thought and emails and team crafting and theory crafting and… You get the idea. Well, we didn’t like where that took us, so yesterday we just said “screw it” and jumped into the ranked queue!

We told ourselves that we would ban Ezreal if we were second pick and pick him if we were first pick. We were second pick, but the other team banned Ezreal for us, so we didn’t have to. Let’s go through the pick stage though.

First pick Varus. I guess with Ezreal out the other team felt very comfortable on Varus. We picked up Tristana and Nunu. Nunu was going into the jungle, but the other team didn’t know that. The other team picks Sona and Vlad. Silly kids, they thought we wouldn’t have any sustain in bot lane. Well, we out-smarted them by conforming and picking support Morgana and Lux for mid. The other team countered with Amumu and Darius. Oh no. I hate Darius. I don’t like his kit. I hate that if he hooks you, you burn flash. That drives me crazy. He’s too dangerous without damage items. Oh well. We’ll send Steve up there anyway. Best of luck, Steve! Steve picks Nasus. It actually worked better than I thought it would.

Level 1 we’re just minding our own business in bottom lane when Amumu, Varus, and Sona come walking in behind us in river. Game on! Our first instinct is to run once we see three. However, Sona is already low from helping Amumu steal our blue. I ignite and start hitting her with autos. I flash to match her flash. One more hit, but she’s under tower. I get the first blood on Sona, and turn to see Amumu and Varus. Then a wild Nunu appears. We had helped him steal the enemy red, so he was in the bottom jungle, ready to wreck some kids. He helps to DPS Varus so even though Varus used summoner heal we still kill him before he can get out. Amumu is crying at my feet, probably because of the double kill I just got, but that double kill, combined with the creep wave that I got to soak up before they showed up ticked me up to level 2. I quick level into my rocket jump and away I go! See ya, suckers! Double kill for the ADC? What a great way to start the game! Blood Boil OP!

I won the race to Infinity Edge, then got my Phantom Dancer, and was going to get a Last Whisper, but the crits were too much. I was somewhat frustrated with my mid-game because I kept getting bullied by Sona and Varus. Their combined poke burst was too much for my small health pool. I guess I was too used to playing as Ezreal and having Dorans and Phage. I also prefer to just sit in bot lane and farm until I’m huge and then team fight and get my kills that way. I felt like the way that bottom lane was going I kept missing lots of experience and gold from waves that I had to miss because I was too low. I would have Varus and Sona tower dive me if I was at or below half health. It was VERY annoying. However, the feeling of just mowing stuff down later was priceless. I haven’t felt like that on Ezreal because I don’t get as much crit through Trinity Force as I would with Infinity Edge and Phantom Dancer.

Lane Switch

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This game started and Sona basically asked if I was competent. wut? She wanted to know if I would be willing to swap and play the bottom lane two versus one against Taric and Vayne. I said I would be glad to, and went to bottom lane.

I played very passively, happily giving up farm because I was out of range. It seemed like Mundo lived in bottom lane. He would show up every time I needed him without ever needing to ask for him. Because of my ability to stealth with my shroud pool, I was able to deny their poke burst combo with Taric’s stun. I wasn’t able to farm the creeps as well because of how close I would need to get to them, but I was able to participate in a number of kills, and still got my fair share of experience and gold.

I apologized mid-way through that game because I was so far behind. The two players started laughing at me. They pointed out the fact that at that point when I had about 70 cs, Skarner had 21. Wow, Sona’s idea to lane swap had put us so far ahead! Even with a limited build on Akali I could wait for Taric’s stun to be down and just pounce on Vayne. Playing 2v1 just after getting my ult I could cut Vayne in half with two Qs and one charge of my ultimate. She had some hard feelings about my shroud, but I just ate an orange and it was k. The win streak continues.